Tag: privacy

A massive database containing contact information of millions of Instagram influencers, celebrities and brand accounts has been found online. The database, hosted by Amazon Web Services, was left exposed and without a password allowing anyone to look inside. At the time of writing, the database had…

We are joined by Chris Gilliard, Professor of English at Macomb Community College. His scholarship concentrates on privacy, institutional tech policy, digital redlining, and the re-inventions of discriminatory practices through data mining and algorithmic decision-making, especially as these apply to college students. He is currently developing a project that looks at how popular misunderstandings of mathematical concepts create the illusions of fairness and objectivity in student analytics, predictive policing, and hiring practices. Follow him on Twitter at @hypervisible.

I’m a bit surprised to find that I’ve been blocked by Chris Gilliard (@hypervisible) on Twitter. I hope I haven’t done or said anything in particular to have offended him. More likely I may have been put on a block list to which he’s subscribed?? Just not sure. I’ll have to follow him from another account as I’m really interested in his research particularly as it applies to fixing these areas within the edtech space and applications using IndieWeb principles. I think this may be the first instance that I’ve gone to someone’s account to notice that I’ve been blocked.

The story somehow just gets worse and worse and still they just apologize and continue on as usual… It’s shocking to see so many who raised ethical issues along the way are remaining silent now, ostensibly because they are still on the gravy train and are enriching themselves by staying silent.

Quotedfrom email about "Policy change in regards to Social Media use for social learning from Centre for Innovation, Leiden University" by Tanja de Bie, Community Manager (Centre for Innovation, Leiden University via Coursera)

The Centre for Innovation of Leiden University has always strongly supported social or collaborative learning in online learning: the interaction between learners facilitating learners, whether that is in discussion forums, peer review assignments or in our Facebook groups, contributes to a deeper understanding of subjects, and prepares learners to apply their knowledge.

However, the Centre for Innovation has a responsibility to our teachers, learners and volunteers, under GDPR and our own Privacy Policy. Based on this we conducted a review of different platforms that we made use of for collaborative, social learning and have decided to move away from those that do not allow us to meet our obligations and promises to those in our care.

Therefore we have decided to close all Facebook groups, Whatsapp groups and Instagram accounts currently under control of the Centre for Innovation, per the 29th of March 2019, and have adjusted our courses accordingly.

At least part of Leiden University is apparently making the moral and ethical call to close all their Facebook related properties. Kudos! They’ve already got a great website, perhaps they’ll move a bit more toward the IndieWeb?

If you don’t already have the scoop, it’s the search engine that can serve as a complete replacement for Google (and Bing and whatever else you like), except it respects your privacy and security. And while Google does some cool tricks, DuckDuckGo does some even better ones.

I switched over to DuckDuckGo for searches a few months ago. There’s a lot of stuff here I didn’t know about especially “bangs” which look really useful.

An exercise I gave my students helps illustrate the risks to privacy in our everyday, offline lives.

I saw some on Twitter say that this was a terrible assignment and that they can accomplish the same goal without being so creepy, but naturally they neglected to give any details about improving on it.

By law, the Census Bureau is required to keep our responses to its questionnaires confidential. And so, over decades, it has applied several “disclosure avoidance” techniques when it publishes data — these have been meticulously catalogued by Laura McKenna

I could envision some interesting use cases for differential privacy like this within an IndieWeb framework for aggregated data potentially used for web discovery.

The Bundeskartellamt has imposed on Facebook far-reaching restrictions in the processing of user data.

According to Facebook's terms and conditions users have so far only been able to use the social network under the precondition that Facebook can collect user data also outside of the Facebook website in the internet or on smartphone apps and assign these data to the user’s Facebook account. All data collected on the Facebook website, by Facebook-owned services such as e.g. WhatsApp and Instagram and on third party websites can be combined and assigned to the Facebook user account.

The authority’s decision covers different data sources:

(i) Facebook-owned services like WhatsApp and Instagram can continue to collect data. However, assigning the data to Facebook user accounts will only be possible subject to the users’ voluntary consent. Where consent is not given, the data must remain with the respective service and cannot be processed in combination with Facebook data.

(ii) Collecting data from third party websites and assigning them to a Facebook user account will also only be possible if users give their voluntary consent.

T-Mobile, Sprint, and AT&T are selling access to their customers’ location data, and that data is ending up in the hands of bounty hunters and others not authorized to possess it, letting them track most phones in the country.